Getting Your Audience Off Somebody Else's Platform

Why a list is different

Followers on a platform are reachable at whatever rate that platform decides, which has fallen steadily and will keep falling.

Customers on a marketplace are not yours to contact at all in most cases.

An email address you hold reaches the person, subject only to their attention and their spam filter.

That is the whole argument. It is not that email is a better channel than everything else. It is that it is the one nobody can alter the terms of.

The mistake in how it is usually asked

Sign up for our newsletter is an offer to send somebody more email, which is not a benefit.

The people who accept it are the ones who were already committed, which is a small proportion of those you could have reached.

What works is a specific reason: early access before something goes public, a discount on a first order, notification when a service becomes available, seasonal timing advice for a trade, or a genuinely useful guide.

The test is whether somebody who did not know you would want the thing, and whether they would notice its absence.

Say what they get and roughly how often, since the unstated fear is that this means daily marketing.

Ask at the moments that work

• Immediately after a purchase, when goodwill is highest.
• In the parcel, on a printed card.
• At the end of a job, in person.
• On the invoice, which everybody opens.
• After a useful page, not on arrival.
• In your email signature, permanently.

The second is the most effective for anything that ships and is used by almost nobody. A card costs a few cents and arrives at the exact moment somebody is pleased with you.

The printed card

Worth separating because it is the highest-return item on this page for any business that sends something physical.

A small card with one sentence, one reason, and a short address or a code to scan.

It arrives when the customer is opening a thing they wanted, which is the best moment you will ever get, and it works entirely outside any platform's rules about contacting buyers.

Keep it to one message rather than combining it with a review request, an offer, and social handles, since a card asking for four things gets none.

For a trade or service business the equivalent is the end of the job, and the same rules apply: one ask, one reason, made in person.

Make it one step

The mechanical point that decides conversion.

One field, the email address, and one button. Every additional field reduces completion measurably, and you do not need a first name to send somebody an email.

If you want a name, ask later or make it optional.

On a phone, the form should be visible without scrolling once somebody has decided, and the keyboard should open on the right type.

And it should confirm clearly that it worked, since a silent form leaves people unsure whether to do it again.

A worked example

A business selling through a marketplace and social accounts had no list at all.

They added three things over a month.

A card in every parcel offering first notice of new stock, which was true and mattered to their customers because things sold out.

A line at the end of their most-read guide page, in context rather than as a pop-up.

And a sentence in their email signature.

The card produced most of it, at a rate they described as far higher than anything they had tried online.

Eighteen months later the list was into four figures, and when the marketplace changed its ranking they had somewhere to go.

None of it had been a campaign. It was three small permanent additions.

Send something, or it decays

The part that gets neglected after the collecting is set up.

A list that receives nothing for a year is not an asset. People forget signing up, mark it as spam when it eventually arrives, and your ability to reach the rest degrades as a result.

A modest regular send, monthly or even quarterly, keeps the list warm and keeps you deliverable.

It also means that when you genuinely need to tell people something, such as that you are selling directly now, the message arrives from a familiar sender rather than out of nowhere.

Consistency matters more than volume or polish here.

Stay inside the rules

Two sets, and both are worth knowing rather than discovering.

Platform rules about contacting customers off-platform vary and some are enforced, particularly on marketplaces. A card in a parcel is generally acceptable where messaging buyers directly to divert them is not, but check rather than assume.

And consent rules apply to the list itself: somebody buying from you has not thereby agreed to marketing, so the signup needs to be a separate positive action with a record of what they agreed to.

Building a large list you cannot evidence is worse than building a smaller one properly, because the whole point is that this asset survives, and one you cannot defend does not.

The counter-case

Email is not the answer for every business.

Some audiences genuinely do not use it much, and a business whose customers are reachable somewhere else may do better building there while accepting the borrowed ground.

There is also a real cost: a list needs something sent to it, and a business with nothing to say will produce filler that trains people to ignore it, which is worse than not having started.

And for a purely local trade with repeat customers who phone, the customer record in your own system is already the direct route, and a newsletter adds little.

The principle is a route to your customers that nobody else controls. Email is usually the cheapest form of that, and it is not the only one.

Building it

1. Decide what people get, and say how often.
2. Put a card in every parcel, with one ask.
3. Ask at the end of every job, in person.
4. Add a line to invoices and your signature.
5. Make the form one field.
6. Record what each person agreed to.
7. Send something regularly, even if it is short.

Step two is the highest-return item here for anybody who ships, and it is the one almost nobody does.

Asking properly is covered in asking for an email address and meaning it.

Frequently asked questions

West Coast Media Solutions Inc. provides web design, web development, hosting, digital marketing, and business consulting to organisations across Canada, drawing on more than twenty-five years in the field.